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Family Group is derived from one of a number of maquettes that Moore made for a sculpture for Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire. In the end none of them was accepted. Several years later, however, he was approached to make a sculpture for the Barclay Secondary School in Stevenage and returned to the theme. The bronze was cast in an edition of four. One is still at the Barclay Secondary School. The others were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Nelson D Rockefeller, and Tate.

Catalogue entry

Entry

This bronze sculpture depicts an almost life-size man and woman seated on a low bench, holding a child between them. The woman sits to the right of the man and holds the child over her lap with both her arms. The man’s left arm support’s the child’s legs while his right hand rests on the woman’s left shoulder. The title, Family Group, indicates that the man and the woman are the parents of the small child.

The poses of the two adults seem to mirror each other, especially in the way that the woman’s right arm and the man’s left arm both curve outwards in a similar arc to hold the child between them (fig.1). The woman has small domed breasts and wears an ankle length skirt that drapes between her knees and stretches across the gap between her shins. Her legs are positioned straight in front of her, while the man’s thin, tubular legs are positioned at a slight angle, orientated towards the woman. Unlike the woman, the man does not appear to be wearing any clothing on his lower body.

When viewed from the side it becomes apparent that the sculpture is not very deep (fig.2). The figures’ knees are drawn up so that their bodies appear to be folding inwards, and their torsos are unnaturally thin. In contrast, the child is chubby and rounded. Positioned in the middle of the sculpture and held aloft by its parents, the child is the natural focal point. Discussing the arrangement of the figures, Moore identified how ‘the arms of the mother and the father [intertwine] with the child forming a knot between them, tying the three into a family unity’.1

Henry Moore in ‘Henry Moore Talking to David Sylvester’, 7 June 1963, transcript of Third Programme, broadcast BBC Radio, 14 July 1963, Tate Archive TGA 200816, p.13. (An edited version of this interview was published in the Listener, 29 August 1963, pp.305–7.)

Although this plaster working model has been dated to 1945, the revised shape of the father’s head – along with its fabrication in plaster, a material Moore had rarely used prior to the Barclay School commission – suggests that it was actually made in preparation for the full-size sculpture between 1947 and 1948.

In September 1994 Meadows recalled that in order to enlarge the plaster to scale he built a measuring frame over the version to be enlarged and another over the model. These frames both had rulers marking lengths in inches so that Meadows could read off a measurement from the smaller ruler and apply it directly to the enlargement. Each measurement referred to a specific point on the surface of the model, which could then be recreated to the correct scale. Using frames and rulers avoided having to make complicated calculations, and ‘was really a very direct thing and could be done in a matter of seconds’. See ‘Interviews with Bernard Meadows’, 22 September 1994, p.24, Henry Moore Foundation Archive.

‘Interviews with Bernard Meadows’, p.45. Numerous photographs at the Henry Moore Foundation show a plaster of Family Group in various stages of development in Moore’s studio, but it is unclear whether these photographs show the original or second plaster.

Sand casting is a technique whereby a model is buried in sand to create a mould from which the bronze can be cast. Sand casting is quicker and less labour-intensive than the lost wax method but is also generally less suitable for reproducing very intricate shapes or surface details.